It’s a full-scale recreation of the Amsterdam annex where Anne, her sister Margot, parents Edith and Otto and four other Jews hid for two years, and it’s filled with everyday artifacts that give fresh insight into the life of the famed diarist, who was eventually arrested and sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she died in 1945 at age 15.
Anne Frank The Exhibition is a limited engagement, scheduled to close on April 30, 2025. Tickets are available at AnneFrankExhibit.org. The exhibition is designed for adults and children (ages 10 and older).
The 7,500-square-foot, one-story exhibition will take visitors on a journey through time, starting with Frank’s childhood in Frankfurt. Using more than 100 original artifacts and multimedia elements, it will also explore the Nazis’ rise to power and Otto Frank’s experiences during the postwar years.
The real secret annex in Amsterdam is empty, per Otto Frank’s request. But the New York replica will be outfitted with some of the Franks’ furnishings.
“We feel that this will bring audiences who are not necessarily familiar with the story closer to that history and closer to Anne Frank,” Ronald Leopold, the Anne Frank House’s executive director, tells the New York Times’ Laurel Graeber.

Scheduled to open on International Holocaust Remembrance Day,
January 27, 2025, to mark the 80th commemoration of
the liberation of Auschwitz.
Many items in the recreated annex, however, are wrenching, as they reveal its occupants’ expectations for an unrealized future. Anne Frank, 13 when she went into hiding, took her diary — a facsimile is here; the original remains in Amsterdam — and Peter van Pels, the teenage boy who briefly won her heart, took his cat (a model of the pet carrier is in the reconstructed spaces) and his bicycle (also a reproduction). In his parents’ room, his mother, Auguste, hung a festive black dress, an original artifact never before displayed and now in the show.
The teen decorated the room she shared with dentist Fritz Pfeffer with pictures of movie stars and royalty, such as Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret of the British royal family, Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers. As she got older, she became more interested in art and covered a postcard of movie stars with a picture of a Michelangelo statue.


In the New York City exhibit, Anne’s story is told chronologically, beginning with her early life and childhood in Germany, through the rise of the Nazi party, the family’s flight to Amsterdam and ultimately, into hiding, through Otto Frank’s postwar life and the publication of Anne’s diary.
The exhibit uses photographs, videos and voice recordings, though perhaps among the most arresting elements is a map of Europe, glowing beneath a glass floor, that depicts the locations of every concentration camp and sites of mass killings during the Holocaust
“We all know that the diary is about the two years in hiding,” Tom Brink, the exhibition’s curator, told the New York Times. “But of course, the story is much bigger than that. It starts earlier, it ends later, and that entire story and entire journey deserves to be told.”
The exhibit’s organizers hope to reach at least 250,000 students and is subsidizing access for visitors from New York City public schools and other public schools with many students from low-income families. (Otherwise, tickets cost $21 during the week and $27 on Sundays.) Tens of thousands of tickets have already been sold for the exhibit, which runs through April 30 before going on tour across the United States.
“It’s important to recognize that the interest among young generations in the story of Anne Frank is rather increasing in the United States,” Leopold said. “So we see, still, a huge interest in the story of Anne. In visiting the [real] house, we cannot accommodate all the people that would like to visit this place.”
